Thank goodness it's Friday - somehow, this week seemed both too long and too short at the same time. So here's links to celebrate that it is Friday, and the weekend is coming!

A self-filling water bottle for cyclists - it catches humidity from the air and collects it in a bottle. I'm not so sure I would really want to drink that water, or how well it would work (especially in dry weather, when you'd need the water the most), but the idea is just cool.

Copenhagen Uni is offering a POD book called "Refashioning Viking Garments"; their sales page also has a pdf with the table of contents to download.

If you're looking for some nice stories to enjoy this weekend, here's a bunch of Escape Artist ones (they are podcasts, so you can even do stuff while enjoying the stories). They're all eligible for the Hugo Awards 2016, in case you have voting rights.

Or you could check out the Recording Archaeology Youtube Channel, where you can find videos from archaeological conferences.

Enjoy!

When taking breaks, I like to go and check what is happening on Twitter. I don't post there often, but there are a lot of tweeters that post things I find amusing, and occasionally a retweet lures me to yet another twitter account, and I follow yet another one.

This happened this morning, when I stumbled across @AcademicsSay. If you are in academia, have been there, or are interested in it - check out that twitter feed. It is a wonderful mix of the hilarious with the slight sadness that comes from knowing that life is exactly that strange, and that weird. Also there's the potential of luring you off into strangenesses, such as this article about a satirical article regarding evidence-based medicine.

The guy behind this account also has a blog called SAS Confidential, which promises quite a few interesting reads as well. Which I will resist to look at for now... because, you know? I should be writing.

Today was a slower day than I had hoped for - but at least I have an amusing link for you, and that is pictures of post-war mass-produced bras called "Maidenform", brought to you  by JSTOR Daily. (The research paper linked to in that article seems to not be behind a paywall, and it contains a few more pictures.)

Outside, it has finally snowed - so our garden now contains this:


 
The cat is not too thrilled by the cold white stuff outside, but she copes. She's also almost invisible in this light in front of certain backgrounds:

It's not the big things that will wear someone down, it's the small things in repetition - a drip feed, if you want. Here's two articles that show this again:

Being a Girl - a Brief Personal History of Violence.
In a similar vein: When Women Stopped Coding. Or: Think twice before giving gendered gifts.

And now have a gratuitous cookie sheep to make this post a little less depressing:



 

I've been getting an early start today, and you are getting a very, very early blog, because of this:






I've started the server migration, and I'm already really, really happy that I did test-runs of almost everything before, and took copious notes. This way, my panic probability is much reduced, even if something does not go quite as planned.

Like my database fooling me into thinking it had not imported, thus trying to re-import... and getting an error message. Obviously.

If you're interested in following the shenanigans in detail, I'll be tweeting live about this - you find me on twitter as katrinkania, and I'm using the hashtag #newserverorbust.

Today was sort of scheduled to get back on track with the website redesign and relaunch. (Short version: I'm running the webshop on Joomla, and I need to do a thorough update on the shop software - which needs some preparation, and also a new template, so I'm looking into that.) Unfortunately, all kinds of things did not go as planned... as in there were server errors, and a version that had been running smoothly before did not run anymore at all.

So. I'm still looking for a design solution that will work properly for a blog function, the webshop and my general site; the templates I've found until now don't really cut the mustard, but I am running out of patience with looking for the perfect solution. Instead, I want this thing over and dealt with.

And just like every time I'm working on something like that, it is amazing how much time gets eaten up by trying to get something running. Even if it ran before... or maybe I should say especially if it ran before.

Tomorrow: Another try. With nicer outcomes (hopefully). Today, though, for calming my nerves and for making you smile, have a picture of a sleepy cat:

The last few months have been... let's call them hectic. At the moment, I'm trying to figure out how they could have gotten so hectic, and trying to make sure things will be more under control in the future. There's also been developments business-wise - the online shop is growing (and a big thank you to everybody who has ordered from there - I hope you have a lot of fun, and are happy, with the things you bought); I've been doing a few workshops, and I've been doing the blog tours, and I have started shifting my appearances from Living History fairs more to wool markets and other kinds of fairs.

So there's been quite a bit of change, and quite a bit of kinds of work that have taken away time from this blog, and from research. There are a few projects that have gotten shoved to the back for ages now, even though they are things I'd love to work on (such as the never-ending project of getting my thesis translated into English, or researching all kinds of smaller and not-so-small questions, or a totally crazy knitting pattern that has been in development for months now), but I just can't find the time, it seems.

I'd like that to change. I'd like to be able to sit down and make a video tutorial for how to make hair nets, or how to spin with a hand-spindle. I'd like to sit down and research female headcloths in the twelfth century, and possible reconstructions for them. But, as I have learned with the embroidery book, these things take a lot of time, and mean quite a bit of an investment of money in some cases, which has to come back in before I can tackle the next project. It's also not such a big deal to work on something for a while hoping that it will eventually bring in a little income, but if projects like that come along again and again, it can sap your energy away bit by bit. And that is, to be frank, happening to me as well. If I spend three weeks of work time on planning, making and cutting a video tutorial (and that is a relatively realistic estimate), then burn it on a DVD and offer it via the shop, but I'm only selling ten or twelve of the discs... it just eats away on me, regardless of how good I think the results are, and regardless of how much fun I had making it.

So... I was thinking of how to get you more content, and how to make it possible for me to create these things, and Patreon popped into my head. Again. (In case you have never heard of Patreon before, it's sort of like an ongoing kickstarter where you can pledge recurring small payments to an artist or a creator of some kind to support their work.) Getting support like that would make it possible for me to start spending more time on research, and sharing that research with my supporters. I'm not entirely sure yet whether that would work at all, or about what to offer, and still very much thinking about this whole thing, so if you have any input at all, please use the comments - would you consider joining in?  Or do you like the idea, but would prefer some other way instead of Patreon? What would you like to see - tutorials about textile crafts? My thesis translated, bit by bit? Things exclusively published for patrons, or would you prefer to support things that are then free for everyone to see?

Just to make things clear - I'm not planning to stop this blog, and I'm not planning to stick it behind a paywall. I would, though, absolutely consider adding extra content only available to supporters - such as the occasional video, copies of my academic articles, or even installments of the book translation. I'd also be happy to take suggestions from the supporters about topics to research.

So... do let me know what you think, per comments, or per Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist vor Spambots geschützt! Zur Anzeige muss JavaScript eingeschaltet sein., or with whatever means you prefer!